The Crisis They Want

Imagine a train rolling down a track. (No, this has nothing to do with the Atlas Shrugged movie opening on April 15th.)

Now imagine a middle aged man who drives his Cadillac Escalade around the railroad crossing arm with its blinking red lights and parks on the train track. The train’s whistle screams at the man to drive off the track. The laws of physics won’t let the train stop in time. There’s no arguing with F=MA.

The man has time to drive off the track, but he does not. If there were something wrong with his SUV, he could jump out and run away, but he does not.

What do you conclude about the man in the Escalade? He wants to die. In a dramatic, violent and irresponsible manner, the man is committing suicide.

What are we to make of a political party that does nothing to stop the coming fiscal crisis in America?

The Republicans are inept, but they seem to understand, however vaguely, that there is a problem. They want to cut spending; well, at least they talk about it. If it were not for the Tea Partiers the Democrats wouldn’t discuss fiscal solvency at all. Just two years ago they passed a stimulus package that added almost a trillion dollars to the debt.

How do we explain that Obama governs as if he were out of touch with reality?

Obama borrowed more in the month of February alone ($223 billion) than did the spendthrift George W. Bush during the entire 2007 budgetary year ($163 billion). Obama recently asserted that not authorizing a lofty new national-debt ceiling would be partisan recklessness. He should know. In 2006, then-senator Barack Obama voted not to raise the debt ceiling and railed against out-of-control government spending under the Bush administration. But then, the annual deficit was one-fifth of what it is today. Apparently President Obama lives in an alternative universe from the one Senator Obama used to inhabit.

Obama and the rest of the Democrats care so little about the coming crisis that they can see it only as an opportunity to demagogue their opponents. The left is scoring cheap points while America is careening toward the abyss.

At what point do we conclude that the Democrats are like the man in the Escalade? They do nothing to head off the coming crisis because they want it.

If you want freedom and prosperity, then a crisis is disastrous. Any great destruction of wealth or breakdown of order is bad if your goal is the greater production of wealth.

But if your goal is to destroy the remnants of capitalism in our economy and replace it with state control in the name of egalitarianism and altruism, why wouldn’t you want crisis? Robert Higgs shows in Crisis and Leviathan that the state flowers in crisis. Peace and prosperity are bad for the growth of the state.

(I’m careful to attribute that to Toohey rather than Ayn Rand because she did bother to examine follies, and she did so magnificently. I think it was Yaron Brook who mentioned this recently.)

If politicians always had good intentions, then socialism would have been cast away in 1920 when Ludwig von Mises’s Socialism demonstrated how a planned economy can only lead to chaos. Socialists didn’t care then that their planning doesn’t work and they don’t care now.

Leftists don’t want a prosperous economy, they want a fair one. And equality of outcome can only be achieved by destruction. You can’t order a poor man to go out and be a productive genius, but you can take money away from the rich and redistribute it.

We are heading for destruction because the left wants destruction.

UPDATE: Slight revision.

UPDATE II: Don’t forget this tape of leftists discussing ways to use violence to change the system. At the end an academic brings up Cloward-Piven’s theory about creating “conditions of ungovernability.” The left very much wants to wreak destruction — on principle. As a former community organizer, Barack Obama was probably aware of Cloward-Piven, unless he was too lazy to read his own side’s literature.

It’s not fair, Benjamin, but they use the word a lot. I think it comes from viewing wealth as a static pie. It’s up to the state to give everyone an equal piece of the pie. Rich people’s wealth comes at the expense of poor people.

In reality wealth is created, and in a free market there is an ever-expanding pie. The quality of life for everyone rises.

People do evil most readily when they think they are helping you.
Anarchists will destroy your property to ‘free’ you from materialism.
Communists will punish individualism to create the collectivist man
The Democrats will destroy the capitalist engine of production to ensure that everyone has something.
Even if that something is the proverbial boot stamping on a human face, forever.

National Security Workforce to Address ‘Intersectionality’: do you ever get the sense that you’re in a waking nightmare? Money quote from the memo: “Our greatest asset in protecting the homeland and advancing our interests abroad is the talent and diversity of our national security workforce.”

Last Week Tonight on Donald Trump: bit long, but great takedown of the Trump mythos. In a more rational political environment, this would have killed his presidential campaign. I’m not sure it’ll make any difference.

A Responsibility I Take Seriously: nominee must be “without any particular ideology or agenda” and have “a keen understanding that justice is not about abstract legal theory, nor some footnote in a dusty casebook.” I sure hope the Republicans can hold the line on his nominations.

Trigger Warnings in Annapolis: I’m not sure why I expected the service academies to be bastions of academic freedom, but I did. It’s much worse than the universities since they’re far more hierarchical.

Announcing the Twitter Trust & Safety Council: this is within their rights, of course. Given the leftist leanings of the company and its assembled Council of Goodspeech, I suspect that some groups will get a pass and some will face suppression. Chilling at any rate.